A 30-kW wind turbine houses and powers a new concept being tested in the Abu Dhabi desert to condense water from the air and pump it into storage tanks for filtration and purification.  Using Eole Water's technology, air is taken in through vents in the nose cone of the turbine and then heated by a generator to make steam. The steam goes through a cooling compressor that creates moisture which is then condensed and collected. The water produced is sent through pipes down to stainless steel storage tanks where it's filtered and purified.  Combining two green concepts in one for regions that are in need of both solutions is a significant achievement.

Kees Van Der Leun has an interesting article over at Grist.org regarding the declining cost of silicon and its effect on the cost of solar PV costs.  He argues that grid parity is approaching faster than many expect and may in fact happen in 2018 for the sunniest parts of the world.  Kees writes "At a very large scale, the cost of manufacturing anything drops to just above the cost of its base materials. As scale goes up, per-unit costs come down. This is known as a "learning curve" -- the price per unit of capacity comes down by x percent for every doubling of cumulatively installed capacity. For solar PV modules, the learning rate has been exceptionally high, averaging 22 percent for the past two decades."  

His conclusion is that once the installed capacity grows from the current 40 gigawatts to 320 gigawatts, grid parity for specific regions will be obtained.  This is an optomistic forecast, but the fact is that silicon prices have dropped significantly and are likely to continue this trend and grid parity will be reached eventually, it is only the time-line that is really debatable.

As always, Martin Lemonica has an excellent column up at CNET and today he discusses Moore's law and how it applies to green technologies.  The 2 key quotes he brings out are Energy Secretary Chu's comment that all industries have a Moore's law - they just have different slopes (rate of change); and Bill Gates comments about battery technology -they have deep physical limits, are particularly important for market research and forecasting.  Green Market Research tries to be realistic in our market numbers, as the rate of change is not necessarily going to be as fast as in other high-tech industries.

One of the key issues in the implementation of a smart grid is interoperability and standards for smart meters.  Many different regulators, utilities, manufacturers, and countries are involved in the process, and there is a lot of interest in working towards a set of standards.  Recently, Iderdrola and ERDF announced they will cooperate on an open PLC specification for the deployment of smart metering and smart grids.   Their focus will be on open power line communications and defining a common PLC telecommunications profile.  France plans to roll out smart meters on large scale starting over the next few years, so the standards they eventually decide upon will be very influential.  GMR continues to follow trends and developments on interoperability and standards in our Global Smart Meters report.

One of the key limiting factors of solar and wind power is energy storage.  As electricity generating technologies have advanced, energy storage technologies have been unable to keep up.  Battery technology has some significant limiting factors, in spite of recent developments, so new forms of energy storage are being tried all over.  For example, Beacon Energy has won a grant from the Department of Energy to produced an advanced flywheel that will store energy in a system of gears.  California is anticipating an energy storage bill, and PG&E has been working on a number of prototypes, such as a compressed air energy storage system.  Other ideas being discussed are water reservoirs (pumping water to a higher level) and ice production (produce ice during peak energy spikes and use it to cool off buildings in place of AC).  The important thing to consider is that these ideas are all large scale and will happen at generating sites or large customers locations.

Researchers at MIT have developed solar cells in the laboratory that mimic some of the key aspects of photosysthesis.  Michael Strano, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and his team of graduate students and researchers have created self-assembling molecules that can turn sunlight into electricity; the molecules can be repeatedly broken down and then reassembled quickly per their paper published in Nature Chemistry.  The photocell is made of several parts, including carbon nanotubes, phospholipids (form discs) and proteins (part of the reaction center.

Nanotubes hold the discs in place, which expose the phospholipids to the light. When the conditions are ripe, the parts assemble themselves, so they can produce an electric current.  To be sure the system could self-assemble, the researchers added a surfactant to the system. The different parts disassembled and turned into a soupy mess. When the researchers washed the soup off, the parts re-assembled.  The new system is about 40 percent efficient, compared to conventional cells that are only 20 percent efficient. The researchers are hopeful they can up the efficiency of their self-assembling cell to 100 percent.

One of the key developments for LED Lights has been increasing the number of lumens per Watt for white light.  Researchers in Japan have announced results of 135 lumens per watt in a paper titled "White Light Emitting Diodes with Super-High Luminous Efficiency" published in the September issue of The Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.  Research team leader Yukio Narukawa said that, although these LEDs are expensive compared to commercialized LEDs, he predicts that the price will come down in the future.  Of course just how much they can come down is a tough question, but experience shows that over time such new technologies often decrease significantly when the market demand is strong enough.

h/t to BM at NextBigFuture

Interesting read over at CNET today, Martin LeMonica writes about small scale solar power, and leads with, "A number of companies are taking advantage of technical advances, notably microinverters, to make buying a handful of solar panels, rather than a roof full, a viable option. That doesn't mean that everyone can install their own electric panels, but it can lower the cost of entry for solar."  As many of our clients realize, the biggest barrier to entry for residential solar power is the initial price tag.  Paying tens of thousands up front for long term savings is difficult even with the government incentives and rebates available today.  Increasing the adoption rate for residential customers is of the highest priority for the PV industry, and thinking small can also be a good way to think big.

A new report released by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shows that the US consumed less energy in 2009 vs. 2008, and that renewable energy sources grew their share of total output.  This is an important issue for market researchers in particular, because there is an inherent bias in our industry that key sectors will always grow, even if at very slow levels.  The report above suggests that the economic recession along with improved efficiency in products and appliances led to the decrease in total energy consumption from 99.2 quadrillion BTUs in 2008 to 94.6 quadrillion BTUs in 2009.  Green energy sources did increase their share, wind power growing 37% in just one year, but the total overall share for renewable sources is still in the single digits, coming in at 8.37%.  There is an excellent graph detailing the sources and uses of energy in the US for 2009 direct from Lawrence Livermore.

A new project along Mexico's Viaducto Bicentenario superhighway near the capital will use solar and wind powered LED streetlights along 23 kilometers of its length starting next month.  Is there enough solar exposure during the average day, efficient storage capacity to make up for low production days, and wind during the night hours for these to meet the needs of a superhighway?  Obviously the designer, Lighting Science Group, and customer, BHP Energy Mexico  believe so; therefore this will be an excellent case study for LED technology going forward and GMR will be sure to keep our eyes on it in our LED market research report.

The Alta Wind Energy Center broke ground today on what the LA times calls the largest wind farm in the country.  Plans are for the project to eventually provide energy for 600,000 homes in southern California, and according to the California Center for Sustainable Energy, "The project will probably be a wind power bellwether, affecting the way renewable energy deals are financed, the development of new electricity storage systems and how governments regulate the industry".  This project is certainly an important case study with a decade of ownership changes, opposition from local residents and transmission infrastructure delays and therefore makes up an important part of GMR's Green Energy Market Research Report.

Green building projects have a great return over a very long period of time, so entities with long term capital budgets can often best take advantage of going fully green.  Local, regional and national governments have the right time horizon to invest in green building technologies that take full advantage of a holistic approach to construction and retrofitting projects.  Chris Cheatham over at Green Building Law Update has a good post up about public private partnerships and how these are coming back into vogue as stimulus funds start to wind down.  He references a particular project of interest, "the General Services Administration recently entered into a P3 lease agreement for a new campus to house the National Nuclear Security Administration's Kansas City manufacturing operations, which are seeking LEED Gold certification", this is likely a precursor of what is to come.

Maximizing light resources so less energy is wasted is one of the corner stones of LED lighting marketing, and product innovation that lends itself to that position probably has a good chance to be adopted quickly.  Heather Clancy over at ZDnet has an interesting article up today about new products from LED Lighting company Illumitex.  Their innovations are designed to deliver the most usable lumens to the task surface, and they claim to have reinvented the basic die and package structure, (removing reflectors and other secondary optics), to produce optically advanced LEDs and efficiently deliver uniform light where the customer wants it.  GMR believes such product development is key to the further growth of the LED industry, and will keep Illumitex in our database of companies whose performance we track in our LED lighting market research report.

The market for residential solar energy systems has held up remarkably well during the current economic downturn.  Many analysts including GMR believe that government incentives have helped maintain this growth level and some anecdotal evidence is provided by an article on Astrum Solar in the Washington Post.  The company is slated to complete 500 installations this year, according to the company's president, Vadim Polikov. "The solar market is incredibly vibrant and exciting," he said. "The market, especially in the U.S., has probably tripled in size just about every year."  Polikov credits government incentives with the increase in business Astrum is seeing. "We have ramped up a lot because of incentives," Polikov said, noting that prior to the flow of federal dollars, the company was averaging a few hundred installations a year.

Digital Lumens has created an energy savings calculator engine to determine how much money an investment in LED lighting will save an organization.  Facilities managers have tough choices these days and before any discussions should be started basic knowledge like this needs to be made available to them.  The results come in five-year analysis for three different scenarios.  It covers what is being used now, standard LED installations, and a custom LED installation that uses intelligent networks for better efficiency.  A framework is included that allows for consideration of future rate increases or an expansion of the system.